War on Poverty planners had argued that poverty persisted in distressed areas partly because banks and other businesses redlined them, starving them of the investment they needed to revive by refusing to do business there.

When black families found a way to buy homes in white neighborhoods, such as Riverside Terrace along Houston's Brays Bayou, the FHA would redline the area as high-risk.

Private banks, and the Federal Housing and Veterans administrations, favored homeowner loans to single-family dwellings in the ‘new homogeneous’ neighborhoods sprouting to the west, and redlined older areas of the city.